Make America Great Again: The Trouble With Rose Tinted Glasses

Some people are really good at remembering history accurately, with all of its scars and ugliness. Take middle school, for example. Most of us remember it well enough to know that we wouldn’t care to revisit that part of our lives ever again.

Some people are not so good at remembering the ugliness. Instead, some people are really good at romanticizing the past. This psychological phenomenon is a cognitive bias sometimes referred to as “rosy retrospection.” And actually, more of us than not are pretty good at this technique. Have you ever heard a parent or grandparent speaking earnestly of the past? Or, how about a friend saying how things were so much better back when we didn’t have ___? (insert noun of choice, like ‘the internet.’)

I know from my own personal experience, I very much used to live in the past. As a kid of the ’70s and early ’80s, I found my adult self frequently lamenting, “Why can’t we just go back to the days of Saturday morning cartoons and giant bowls of cereal?” It wasn’t until years of cognitive behavioral therapy that I realized exactly how harmful romanticizing the past was. For me, it became a coping mechanism that I formed to steel myself against some of the really horrible things that happened in my life at a very young age.

Yes, we had Scooby-Doo and The Bugs Bunny/Roadrunner Show, and Kellogg’s was still using “Sugar” in its titles, i.e., Sugar Corn Pops, Sugar Frosted Flakes. Certainly, I remember drinking water from the garden hose in the summer and riding all over town on my Ross Stingray banana seat pink polo bicycle – without a helmet. And yes, I lived to tell about it. Sure, it is actually true that we kids made our home the outdoors, and we explored the neighborhood woods and creeks, or came together in cul-de-sacs for roller skating, and games of red light green light, and flashlight tag. We knew which lawns had the nice soft grass, pleasing to walk on barefooted, and which yards would get us screamed at if we dared to trespass. Absolutely, it’s true that the streetlights were our cue to come home for dinner on Saturday, and we wore ourselves slam out, came home ravished, ate dinner at the table, settled down watching The Love Boat, and went to bed without bathing.

But it wasn’t all fun and games.

What the memory of childhood tends to downplay or forget altogether is that we had probably at least as much, and possibly more bad outweighing the good. During that era of outdoor play, sugary cereal, and four hour marathons of Saturday morning cartoons, we also had pregnant mothers who saw nothing wrong with smoking while pregnant. We had the impeachment hearings of President Richard Nixon in the Watergate affair, and his subsequent resignation, the first of any American President. Twenty-nine people attending an American Legion convention in Philadelphia were killed by a mysterious, terrifying ailment, discovered a year later to be a bacterium, which we came to know as Legionnaires’ Disease.The New York city blackout resulted in massive looting and disorderly conduct for the duration of twenty-five hours.

The Iran hostage crisis began. We also had an insurgence of religious cults gaining momentum – The Children of God, the Unification Churchand the “moonies,”Heaven’s Gate,Branch Davidians, and, of course, Jonestown and its subsequent massacre, to name a few.There seemed to be a rash of widely publicized, mystifying serial killing sprees from Son of Sam to Ted Bundy. The AIDS epidemic became recognized and people lived their lives in fear and uncertainty as homophobia took on a life of its own. Incorrect information was widespread and ignorance about this deathly syndrome was rampant.

Mount St. Helens erupted, killing fifty-seven people. John Lennon was assassinated by a stranger and Marvin Gaye was assassinated by his father. Global warming became well-known to the scientific and political communities and people got angry. We watched in horror as Ethiopians suffered widespread famine and children starved to death in front of us on TV sets.

During class, we sat and watched in sheer silence as The NASA Space Shuttle Challenger disaster unfolded, taking several lives, one of which was a school teacher who would’ve been the first teacher in space. Parents around the country held on to their children a little tighter as they watched the story of cute little 6-year-old Adam Walsh, who vanished in broad daylight, just an aisle over from his mother in a shopping mall, and was later found to have been abducted and brutally killed. And also, the financial world of the 80s put a spotlight on greed personified in the form of a rich man named Donald Trump.

Now, thirty-six years later, greed personified is our President. And not just greed, but this shell of a man also is a textbook case of narcissism and tyranny. He campaigned simply on a slogan of “Let’s Make America Great Again,” referring to some unidentified era in U.S. history that his followers couldn’t quite name either, but knew it just somehow rang true.

People who fell for a line like “Let’s make America great again” are the very same people who spend the present living in the past. When they drone on about the horrible state of the world today, they also long for a time when “things were just better.” If pressed to recall exactly which year was better, they might have some idea of a year that was personally better for themselves (for any number of reasons having nothing to do with the President). But they fail to remember all the bad stuff that happened that year, too.

These people, as I’ve learned, are also not very well able to look outside their own bubbles and see issues that affect the greater good (or detriment) of the people. Therefore, they vote on issues that exclusively impact their own lives, and maybe the lives of their immediate family or a few close-knit friends. Being a bleeding heart liberal, it has always been my mindset that when you are handed the awesome privilege to vote, you really shouldn’t vote for the betterment of your own situation exclusively. You should vote for the betterment of the people. Which includes ALL people. You don’t get to censor people’s basic, civil rights.

On the note of censoring, trump may threaten and attempt to censor the “dishonest” media (he won’t succeed), but that doesn’t mean that your closet racist Uncle Fred or your pumpkin spice loving, white BFF Jessica has the permission to do likewise. They don’t get to censor Facebook, sending threats to “unfriend” anyone who posts political stuff. The story of this exact thing happening has lately been recounted over and over again across Facebook groups where people come to ask for advice on this very thing.

The resounding response from the overwhelming majority is always, “when people think your personal posts are at/about/directed towards them such that they take personal offense, it illustrates their very self-centered world view. And that is a huge problem with why we are exactly where we are right now.” I’ll use an analogy I’ve heard a lot of conservatives make whenever police brutality happens and a black person is killed. They always say, “if he wasn’t doing anything wrong in the first place, he should’ve done what the cop said/not run from the cops/kept his hands on the wheel/not voiced his concerns, etc., etc. (Never mind the fact that plenty of black people who have been killed were obeying orders.) Regardless, under that logic, one could argue that, if you’ve done nothing wrong in electing President trump, you should have nothing to feel attacked over in a Facebook post, right?

I’d also like to discuss this notion of people saying “America is the greatest nation in the world, and illegal immigrants are ruining us.” I agree America is pretty great, but I disagree that illegal immigrants are ruining us. I’m pretty sure your white, pumpkin spice loving BFF Jessica does not want to work in the fields, planting tobacco or wearing a hard hat for a construction job. And besides, saying that type of thing out loud, over and over for the rest of the world to hear is pretty much the equivalent of the stuck up, puffed up high school jocks who think every guy wants to be them, and every girl wants to get with them. Those poor guys… they have no idea how many “normal” kids are laughing at their shallowness and stupidity. In terms of age, America is the privileged,puffed-up teenager of the world, and boy do we act like it. We really shouldn’t fool ourselves – other countries have been laughing at our immaturity forever.

Maybe what will go down as one of the ugliest facets of this past year’s history, though, is that half of our country did not even vote this election. We fought exclusively for that right, we fought hard, and we don’t even use it? And then what happens? We get a very mentally unstable, sick, narcissistic psychopath by the name of Donald Trump who actually gets elected 45th President of the United States.

And here we are, pining painfully, for an unidentified time in America that half of us believe was truly “great,” a belief held from behind rose tinted glasses, from people who favor living in the past over progress and growth.

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Martie Todd Sirois (pronounced 'sir-ROY') is a writer whose work has been frequently featured on HuffPost, Medium, Scary Mommy, and several other media outlets. Martie is also the mom who wrote & posted a letter on social media in 2016 that went viral, thanking the tween girls' clothing store Justice. In the turbulent aftermath of her state's notorious anti-LGBTQ law, HB2 (the "bathroom bill"), Martie wanted to thank Justice for giving her (then, gender creative son) a wonderful and affirming experience despite local government trying to mandate public accommodations (including bathrooms, locker rooms, and changing facilities) to be gender segregated exclusively by the sex indicated on one's birth certificate. She hoped by making her Facebook post public, she could let her local LGBTQ+ community know that this store was an affirming environment for TGNC kids. She never expected it to go viral, but within a few days of publishing it, that letter had been shared over 25,000 times, and two years later, continues to be circulated widely around the internet, with new people discovering it and seeking Martie out to relay how much her letter touched them for various reasons.
Martie has also been featured on BuzzFeed, Upworthy, That Odd Mom, Spoke for Red Tricycle, The Good Men Project, Today Show Parenting Community, and many other media outlets. Some of her work has been translated and syndicated worldwide.
While she has enjoyed a 30+ year “hobby career” performing on stage as an award-winning actress in both musical and non-musical theatre, Martie now enjoys using her free time to write about any and everything - but mostly about life with three children, the youngest of whom has been gender non-conforming since the age of 2 1/2 years old. In the process of learning how best to support a TGNC child who avidly swims against the current, Martie has also unwittingly (but lovingly) become a speaker, educator, and advocate for the LGBTQ and especially, the TGNC (trans and gender non-conforming) communities.
As someone who "writes for therapy" and has kept numerous journals all her life, Martie got her first public and professional writing experience when she read some of her blog material out loud for the first time ever, in an audition, and was then cast in the national live reading event series, Listen To Your Mother (RDU, 2016). For eight years, LTYM gave local writers across all 50 states and Canada a platform to read their original work on motherhood (or about mothers) before a live audience, and to have their readings enshrined forever on the YouTube LTYM channel. LTYM opened up many opportunities for Martie, starting with sharing some of her work on WUNC Radio's (NPR affiliate, NC) "The State of Things" with Frank Stasio. (LTYM, founded by Ann Imig, concluded its eight-year run with a national series finale in 2017.)
For her writing, Martie has also been interviewed by John Fugelsang on SiriusXM Insight's "Tell Me Everything, With John Fugelsang;" by The Washington Post; by Kind World of WBUR Radio (NPR, Boston); and she particpated with her husband and TGNC child in "StoryCorps," the prestigious Peabody award-winning podcast that shares important unscripted conversations, with weekly broadcasts debuting on NPR's "Morning Edition." Martie's family's story was one of the recorded stories chosen by StoryCorps to be publicly aired in or around September of 2017.
Martie is also the founder and leader of S.E.A.R.CH. (Safe Environmient for the Acceptance of Rainbow CHildren), a program of the LGBT Center of Raleigh, that serves as a playgroup for TGNC children ages 12 and under, and as a discussion group for parents. S.E.A.R.CH. also has a secret Facebook group which currently allows over 260 members, from all over the country and beyond, to celebrate, and have connections with other parents & caregivers supportively raising TGNC children.
Martie has proudly served on The Family Equality Council, (Southern Advisory Board), and greatly enjoys opportunities to guest lecture or speak on gender, inclusiveness, gender diversity, and the issues facing TGNC people. She has presented on these topics at a range of locations, from public universities like NCSU, to more private settings among public school guidance counselor meetings. Martie also spoke on a panel that presented on the topic of creating safe & inclusive spaces for LGBTQ+ students, in the Safe Schools of NC's annual Conference for Educators.
When not working or writing, Martie loves living and volunteering in her hometown in NC with her husband, Matt, their three beautiful children, and their two peculiar but lovable pets.
Visit her online at: www.gendercreativelife.com
Twitter: @TheMartieSirois